Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Proposal: Prenominal Adjectives in Japanese

在Richard K. Larson博士的指导下，Hiroko Yamakido女士将为她的博士论文收集数据。她的研究涉及日语方言的变化，重点是形容词的变化。她将研究从日本北部到南部的七个县的方言变体，包括北海道、福岛（或新潟）、大阪、京都、广岛、福冈和鹿儿岛。该项目的核心数据将通过与母语人士的口头访谈来收集，并就涉及形容词的例句和短语的可接受性和意义范围咨询他们。这些形容词包括那些在英语中表示友好的形容词，比如“老朋友”（可以表示“老朋友”或“老朋友”），以及在语境中发现的形容词，比如结果句（“玛丽把金属锤平了”）、使役句（“玛丽让约翰高兴”）、状语（“玛丽说话很快”）和所谓的二级谓语结构（“玛丽吃了生鱼”）。Yamakido女士还将查阅仅在相关地区提供的出版资料和几位日本方言学家。她的田野调查结果将与日语中前名形容词的性质有关：它们是被投射到定语结构中（如“蓝色的房子”）还是被投射到关系从句结构中（如“蓝色的房子”）。这一研究对生成句法和语义学理论，特别是对日语方言学具有重要意义。这不仅有助于加深对日语语法的理解，也有助于加深对日语语法形态和句法形式之间关系的认识；它还将展示在一小部分语法中丰富的多样性以及跨方言比较的重要性。

Under the direction of Dr. Richard K. Larson, Ms. Hiroko Yamakido will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research concerns dialect variation in Japanese, with focus on adjectival inflection. She will study the variants spoken in seven prefectures that extend from northern to southern Japan, including Hokkaido, Fukushima (or Niigata), Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Kagoshima. The project's core data will be gathered though oral interviews with native speakers, who will be consulted regarding the acceptability and range of meanings of example sentences and phrases involving adjectives. The adjectives include those showing the amibuity in English examples like "OLD friend" (which can mean 'aged friend' or 'long-time friend'), as well as adjectives found in contexts like resultatives ("Mary hammered the metal FLAT"), causatives ("Mary made John HAPPY"), adverbials ("Mary spoke QUICK-ly"), and so-called secondary predicate constructions ("Mary ate the fish RAW"). Ms. Yamakido will also consult published sources available only in the relevant locales and several Japanese dialectologists. The results of her fieldwork will bear on the nature of prenominal adjectives in Japanese: whether they are projected into attributive structures (like "blue house") or into relative clause structures (like "house that is blue").This research is significant both for theories of generative syntax and semantics generally, and for Japanese dialectology in particular. It will not only advance understanding of Japanese grammar, and the relation between its morphological and syntactic forms; it will also demonstrate the rich diversity within a small sector of the grammar and the importance of cross-dialectal comparison.